Developments

Eraring set to close seven years early in 2025

Chris Briggs,Research Director, Institute for Sustainable Futures, University of Technology Sydney In a major step forward for Australia’s clean energy transition, the country’s biggest coal-fired power station Eraring is set to close seven years early in 2025, Origin Energy announced this morning. Eraring has been operating for 35 years in the central coast of New South Wales. Last year, it alone was responsible for around 2% of Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions, based on calculations from electricity market and emissions data. The fundamental reason for its early closure is the brutal impact the growth of renewable energy is having on the profitability of coal plants. Origin has announced it will be building a large, 700 megawatt battery on-site in its place to store renewable energy. This announcement follows the acceleration of other major coal plant closures: Liddell power station is scheduled to close in 2023, Yallourn’s closure was brought forward to 2028, and only last week AGL Energy edged forwards the scheduled closure of two more coal plants. This is a welcome step with transition planning by Origin – but also underlines the risks of Australia’s clean energy transition accelerating without a national plan for the exit of coal. Why is this happening? Old power stations are excellent sites for batteries due to their existing connections to transmission lines and lots of electricity capacity. This has also been announced for the closed Hazelwood and Wallerawang coal power stations. Over the past 12 months, the market share of renewable energy has increased to over 30%. In particular, the rapid growth of rooftop solar and solar farms in the middle of the day has sent daytime wholesale electricity prices crashing. To stay open, coal plants are using a variety of coping strategies. This includes cycling their output down on sunny days and ramping back up for higher prices as the sun sets and demand increases at the end of […]

Royal Wolf sets sail for future growth in global supply squeeze

As the global logistics squeeze continues to make front page news, the humble cargo box has seized the spotlight. Logistics woes now impact an estimated two out of three businesses, with no easy fix in sight for the world’s fractured supply chain. The two-year-old pandemic continues to whip up a perfect storm of culprits: global labour shortages; container crews benched for weeks on end by Chinese quarantines; a logjam of empty containers piling up at congested ports. The result? Soaring freight and transportation costs colliding head-on with a spike in e-commerce, spawned by long lockdowns. Royal Wolf, Australasia’s largest importer of new shipping containers and the biggest rental supplier, is right in the eye of the storm. Managing Director, Neil Littlewood, speaks about the challenges of the commodities squeeze, countering customer frustrations, and finding new growth solutions in adverse conditions. Compounding forces When you consider that about 90 per cent of the world’s exports are transported via ships and that most of those goods arrive ashore in container boxes, the scale of the problem becomes clear, says Mr Littlewood. Weighing in, too, are factors not directly pinned to C0vid-19. Australia’s trade imbalance with China means empty containers aren’t returning to China. Plus, the six-day Suez Canal blockage last March effectively paralysed one of the world’s most vital shipping arteries. On top of Omicron, you’ve had the Chinese New Year with its sacrosanct shutdown of factories and the Winter Olympics in Beijing coming straight after that, says Mr Littlewood. All these ripple effects just compound in a sphere as interconnected as the global shipping industry. Rates and reliability Both container prices and production times are at least double their pre-COVID levels, reports Mr Littlewood. Pre-pandemic, if we placed an order for standard (20 or 40 foot) containers, they would be in […]

OFS Debuts in US with Pelican Brewing Deal

Australian manufacturing performance software company, OFS, has made its official debut in the United States through a breakthrough deal with Oregon-based craft brewery, Pelican Brewing Company. With three breweries and brewpubs along the coast near Portland, Pelican has been a staple of the US craft brewing industry since it was established in 1996. It now produces nearly50,000 barrels – equivalent to almost six million litres or 14 million schooners – every year, serving Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and California, and with an eye on further expansion. It makes beer on demand for its retail and consumer customers, a key element of the quality and freshness standards to which it holds itself. The craft brewer was looking for a software solution that could provide better insights to help it identify and resolve issues, improve efficiency, and reduce waste. The OFS software uses sensors to draw real-time data from Pelican’s filling and packing lines and combines this with insights from the folks who operate the line to identify and reduce inefficiencies and waste. The implementation of OFS hardware and software at Pelican was completed in less than one day. One of the key areas where Pelican has seen tremendous value is in starting up production. Understanding the inefficiencies and inconsistencies in methods and time consumed as operators perform sanitation and initial quality assurance/quality control (QA/QC) checks is very important. Pelican can now identify the delays that occur early in the morning, allowing the team to optimise these processes. Another significant insight, and subsequent opportunity, discovered during the OFS trial at Pelican Brewing Company came from an unlikely source. OFS identified that the cardboard boxes used on the bottling line wasn’t folding correctly due to quality issues, resulting in one of the biggest causes of unplanned downtime. Pelican was able to use this data […]

Sydney Trains reduce testing time with cloud-first codeless test automation strategy

Sydney Trains has implemented Tricentis Tosca for codeless test automation as part of its cloud–first strategy. This shift from manual testing has resulted in a 100% regression test automation for existing applications and has enabled a 66% reduction in testing time on 10,000 mobile devices in the field. “Our goal is to serve the public and to move them safely on their full journey – spanning their service on roadways, waterways and trains,” says Ernie Lam, Senior Manager of Digital Products and Applications at Sydney Trains. “We look at transport as a whole, not just point to point. We want to get you all the way from your home to wherever you want to go and ensure your travels are as seamless as possible in an exceptionally large area.” Achieving such a goal is dependent on both prebuilt and custom internal systems. These applications are designed to ensure a seamless travel experience for travelers, deploy management and safety tools for the million trips taken per day in Sydney, and facilitate the daily journeys of thousands of individuals. In addition to maintaining existing software in the tech stack, the development and testing teams work closely together to deploy new applications and feature sets throughout the year. Many of these applications are designed to run on 10,000+ mobile iOS devices, including iPhones and iPads, as part of Transports NSW’s cloud first strategy. “It was not sustainable to keep doing manual testing. The major focus was needed to build quality from the beginning and all the way through each code release. To achieve this at speed, we needed to embed test automation to facilitate that quality”, says Lam. In addition to maintaining existing system upgrades, the team is working to provide testing for new cloud applications including the rollout of a critical internal […]

New study reveals massive size of workforce powering Australia’s gas industry

A new report has revealed the extraordinary size of Australia’s gas industry supply chain for the first time – from offshore technicians in the North West of WA to gas fitters and gas bottle retailers in the suburbs of our biggest cities. Highlighting the depth and scale of the gas industry supply chain’s economic and social contribution, just over 165,000 full time equivalent (FTE) jobs were directly supported as well as about 47,000 businesses. Western Australia had the most direct jobs at almost 69,000 FTE roles, followed by Queensland at over 31,000, Victoria at almost 29,000, NSW with about 14,000 and NT and SA with about 11,000 jobs each. Another 95,000 jobs nationally are indirectly supported by the supply chain – meaning a total of just over 260,000 jobs across Australia are directly and indirectly are supported in total. The study, Economic and Employment Contribution of the Australian Gas Industry Supply Chain: 2020-21, was prepared by Australian Economic Advocacy Solutions for the Australian Gas Industry Trust (AGIT). The jobs are held by workers like Broome-based seafarer Shannon Sibosado, 39, who is about to start training as an offshore crane operator after upskilling himself with industry-backed indigenous training programs. “I do vessel maintenance on the boats that transport rig supplies, plus maintaining the rigs with things like safety systems,” Mr Sibosado said. “I wasn’t really aware of the gas industry until I was in it. It was all around me but I hadn’t really clicked that these types of jobs were here.” The study also reveals how youths are supported with a pathway to employment, with about 2,200 young Australians in apprenticeships and traineeships last financial year. The gas industry’s supply chain directly provides 1.8 in every 100 jobs nationally – with the NT leading at 11.4 jobs per 100 jobs, […]

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Carbon Drawdown Initiative monitors ground data related to CO2 sequestration

The Carbon Drawdown Initiative GmbH was founded in January 2020 and is focused on promoting research, public discourse, and impact investment in the field of “negative emissions”. This involves the removal of carbon from the atmosphere with subsequent long-term storage of that carbon. This CO2 removal is crucial to counteracting climate change by achieving “net zero”. This is especially important considering that certain emissions are difficult to avoid and will continue to occur in the future. The next step would then be to reverse the impact of historical emissions to bring current temperatures back down. If this does not happen, the excessively warm climate will continue for millennia. In addition to public discourse, political work, and early investment in start-ups with innovative concepts for CO2 removal, the Carbon Drawdown Initiative also launched its own Enhanced Weathering project. “Project Carbdown” is being implemented by a network of technology companies in the Nuremberg metropolitan region and renowned scientists from various international universities, including the Alfred Wegener Institute and the universities of Hamburg and Wageningen. Enhanced Weathering Project, “Project Carbdown” The focus of the collaboration is research into accelerated weathering on arable land – a method of generating negative emissions. This involves adding ground rocks (such as basalt), which react with CO2 in the air upon contact, to arable soil. Since natural weathering would take thousands of years – too slow to have the rapid impact needed to reduce global warming – methods to significantly accelerate this chemical reaction will be explored. These include, for example, the use of different grain sizes, various crop types, or other soil additives such as biochar. The aim is to develop a measurement method that records the amount of CO2 collected per hectare of arable soil. On this basis, farmers could be enabled to participate in emissions […]

Streamlining supply chains – with data

By Erich Gerber, SVP EMEA & APJ – TIBCO Supply chains are essential to everyday life and are made up of important links. Those links are people, processes, and facilities; everything that’s needed to deliver goods from one location to the other, and technology plays a critical role in enabling and maintaining those links. If you are simply the recipient of those goods, chances are you don’t think too much about supply chains, until one of those links breaks – just like when the toilet paper supply chain broke in the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic. Despite no inherent weakness in the toilet paper supply chain, undue stress was placed on production companies due to ‘panic buying’ during the pandemic, a completely unpredictable situation. However, the pandemic also resulted in a number of expected and very justifiable demands on supply chains, for example the enormous surge in online shopping, for everything from groceries to fitness equipment. The challenge for all players in the supply chain — manufacturers, importers, warehouses, shippers and retailers — is to meet demand and keep customers happy without any noticeable disruption. The key to this is accurate data and the technology behind it at different touch points throughout the supply chain, which can help businesses analyse the demand and supply so they can plan and execute accordingly. Analytics and data-driven insights allow manufacturers and operators to optimise production and distribution capacity. And signals generated from market changes like seasonality and social events can be used to escalate production or even reallocate distribution. Using data to manage supply chains For more ambitious supply chain enhancements, the solution is to leverage the same digital technology that is disrupting supply chains and re-invent them for optimal performance. In this digital world, ‘chain’ itself becomes something of a misnomer. […]

Paessler PRTG Hosted Monitor capabilities expand to meet global market needs

Paessler, the monitoring experts, has expanded the potential of its PRTG Hosted Monitor solution. The monitoring-as-a-service offering is now available across multiple markets with a diverse range of licensing options to ensure all users get the solution best suited to their needs. PRTG Hosted Monitor is a service built on Paessler’s award-winning PRTG Network Monitor. With its widespread functionality in IT monitoring, and easy integration into systems and networks, PRTG solutions enable IT professionals to monitor classic infrastructure, data centre environments and services, and IoT/OT devices at the same time within one tool. PRTG Hosted Monitor offers more than 250 predefined sensors out of the box and is able to monitor any device that has an IP address associated with it. With its one-platform view and real-time insights, the key benefits of integrating PRTG Hosted Monitor are: IT monitoring without server hardware – Based on Paessler’s PRTG Network Monitor, this solution doesn’t need to be downloaded nor require a server installation. It is available on-demand and comes with Paessler’s support and maintenance competence thanks to it being hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud Computing Services. Combine Cloud and IT Infrastructure – Monitor public reachable targets and integrate physical networks all over the world using distributive monitoring techniques. OpEx instead of CapEx – Full subscription flexibility in payments, licensing and contracts, giving users freedom to change the size of their license and choose between monthly or annual payment options. New for 2022, PRTG Hosted Monitor is now available across APAC and for the first time, through Paessler’s channel partners.

Australian manufacturers: Intelligent automation boosts growth and competitiveness

By Leigh Pullen, CEO, CiGen Manufacturers have long embraced automation. Typically, this has been in the factory where physical tasks performed by people have been replicated by machines. For example, General Motors started using robots in factories over 60 years ago. And we’ve seen similar stories ever since the first steam driven looms were used during the Industrial Revolution. But, when it comes to business processes, there are substantial opportunities to automate tasks in order to boost productivity and reduce workplace boredom. Factories represent just one element of successful manufacturing operations. For the business to succeed it needs a number of other crucial functions to work at their best. When we look at business processes, ranging from customer service through to financial reporting, managing equipment maintenance and back office operations, we find that many tasks are repeated each day, week or month by people executing the same steps over and over. Intelligent automation, using tools such as robotic process automation (RPA), can support people in key business functions and free them from restrictive, time consuming and monotonous tasks allowing them to focus on higher value activities and empowering them to deliver new innovations that can supercharge growth and competitiveness. No more rekeying For most Australian manufacturers there are tasks that rely on information stored in one system being rekeyed into another. A machine may record how long it’s been operating or how many widgets it has turned out. At the end of a day, that information might be collected by a person and re-entered into a spreadsheet. The data might then be copied into a maintenance log or some other application. Everything from initial data collection through to the entry into other applications can be automated. A piece of software code can read the information from the machine, reformat or […]

Q & A:Craig Charlton, CEO, SugarCRM

How are you finding current business conditions? The lockdowns across Australia may have stunted the growth of the manufacturing industry, but manufacturers have also pivoted their businesses to ride out the challenging environment. They have also responded to rapid change by shortening their supply chain, placing emphasis on JIT (Just In Time), and creating value for their customers. In general, the pandemic has fundamentally changed how we work and live, and has driven accelerated adoption of digital channels, such as eCommerce and social commerce, across multiple industries. In fact, in the most recent report from Essence Global, 71 percent of Australian consumers surveyed are highly likely to buy from social channels in future and 50 percent have already participated in live shopping and conversational commerce. At SugarCRM, we see more effort from our customers in making the (personalised) customer experience their mandate. CRM is now businesses’ primary source of customer data and information; they can manage their goals, workflows, and processes, as well as continuous communications with customers no matter where they are. With the rise of the digital economy, sales, marketing, and service teams are swimming in copious amounts of customer data to interpret and inform personalised, empathic communications. They need capabilities to help them sift through and find customer insights through that data. Capabilities such as AI-driven sentiment analysis are supercharging CRM functions such as sales, marketing, and service interactions with the insight into each customer’s and prospect’s emotional state and intent. And these AI-driven solutions are doing so seamlessly in the background, sifting through massive data sets across customer channels to help teams on the customer front lines identify the next-best actions and opportunities. More businesses are also starting to understand the criticality of sales and marketing to be in lock-step to win business and support growth. […]

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